The Vine reboot Divine has dropped its invite-only sign-up, Engadget reports. After roughly three months in invitation-only mode, the 6-second video app is open to anyone — no code required.
What is the Vine reboot Divine?
Divine, the Vine reboot led by Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath — one of Twitter’s earliest employees — is not officially affiliated with the original app, which folded nearly a decade ago. It keeps the format that made Vine a meme machine: looping clips of six seconds. The app carries a “classic” feed of restored uploads, and more than two million videos from Vine’s original archive are back online.
The money behind Divine comes from Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder, though the company says he has no equity or ownership — TechCrunch covered the Dorsey-backed launch. The plumbing is the open-source nostr protocol, which Dorsey has also funded — posts sit on a decentralised network rather than one company’s servers.
How is Divine different from TikTok and Instagram?
Divine’s other selling point is what it excludes. Users can only share videos recorded with the in-app camera, and built-in AI detection tools are meant to keep anything generated or clipped from elsewhere off the feed.
“A whole bunch of what you see on social media is people clipping content and moving it around between things. None of the stuff you see on Divine was ever on other platforms before, it was either on Vine originally or it’s now on Divine. You’re not going to see the same thing that you see on TikTok and Instagram.”
Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, Divine creator
Creator payouts are on the roadmap, something Vine never managed. “We don’t know exactly how it’s all going to work, but we do know that as creators grow, as they build an audience, they want the ability to make money.”
TikTok built the creator model Divine wants: the company says short-form video adds Dhs 4 billion to the UAE economy and supports 7,000 jobs.
The launch lands amid a wave of nostalgia for early social media. A recent documentary about Myspace prompted weeks of speculation about its return, CNBC reported, and smaller apps have been trying to recreate the simplicity of the web’s early years. Henshaw-Plath’s answer: “Let’s empower people to not have AI slop, and let’s design it this way so that it can’t be enshittified in the future.”
Divine is free to download from the App Store and Google Play.
Is Divine available in the UAE?
Yes — Divine Video is listed on the UAE App Store, and it is free to download from the App Store and Google Play. The invite-code requirement has been removed entirely, so there is no waitlist or invitation gate.
What is the nostr protocol?
Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is an open-source protocol for decentralised social media. Instead of one company’s servers, posts are stored across many independent relays. Jack Dorsey has also funded nostr infrastructure.
What happened to Vine?
Vine was shut down in early 2017, roughly four years after Twitter acquired it. Many of its top creators had already left, frustrated that the platform was not supporting them — the problem Divine now says it wants to avoid.
